We have a daughter with a chronic illness, so we spend a lot of time in hospitals, clinics and doctors’ offices. One thing I’ve noticed on these visits is that healthcare professionals spend a lot more time doing admin than they do actually treating and speaking to patients,
or improving their skills. This strikes me as an awful waste.
Many CEOs I come across are in a similar situation. They’re spending most of their time managing the operations of the business, rather than speaking to existing customers, winning new ones, or creating the ideas and strategies that will drive future success.
This is madness. In fact, I would even call it sick.
Here are the three main causes of this disease and 3 ideas about how to address them:
1) Poor self-management: Allowing distractions, spending too much time on “urgent” but unimportant tasks, filling your head with noise from the news media, etc. It all needs to stop. Audit your time for a week, locate these lost hours, and develop strategies to eliminate them, permanently.
2) Bad delegation: If you delegate something and it doesn’t get done right, that’s on you, not them. Did you select the right person, give them the right tools, and explain the why as well as the what? If not, those are the areas you need to focus on.
3) Arrogance: Just because you can (or think you can) do something better than someone else, doesn’t mean you should. There are a lot of tasks for which “good enough” is perfectly sufficient. Identify them and make sure they’re not on your to do list. Bearing in mind you shouldn’t have a to do list anyway. But that’s for another article….
If you want to discuss ways of managing less and leading more, drop me a line: info@hamishmackenzie.com or book a 30-minute call with me here.
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Copyright Hamish Mackenzie, 2020
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